Of course WhatsApp would love us to believe "Resistance is Futile", but given the giant number of friends that jumped onto Signal since the WhatsApp Terms of Service change announcement (maybe 35% of all my contacts in this period), I can tell you, it made a big impact. Maybe these friends still have WhatsApp on their phone, but they are active on other platforms suddenly as well.

The way I see it WhatsApp really shot themselves in the foot by providing a solution to the Collective Action Problem in a network. "No one can leave our network because everyone gets fed up with us at a different time, and network effects will pull any of these single defectors back in". "I know, let's threaten all our users at once!"

Ok, so here is the solution... the single biggest step that could clean up the android ecosystem.

Simply allow users to revoke permissions.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=10340

I download the app, remove all the silly permissions it asks for and then install it to test it out.

Dunno why google is so driven to butter up the phone carriers still. They have won. Why not start looking out for the users? Exactly this type of change is needed.

Right now, I am driven to install only open source software on my phone--not just to support the free software movement-- but by sheer terror of what all those crazy proprietary android apps want to do with their totally out of control permissions. Web access for a password safe, are you FREAKING KIDDING ME?!

Next version of androidOS needs to drain this swamp. Just saying "people should only install trusted apps on their phones" is the worlds stupidest, lamest, cover-yer-butt cop out.

I read the news to know what is news as much as to know what is going on.

If I am reading what someone / a recommendation engine thinks I want to see, it defeats the purpose of feeling out the pulse of the public. If I want something different, something tailored, I will seek it out by joining a community such as slashdot, identi.ca or some other community that curates information for me. I go to the Nytimes, CNN and to google news to see the IE6 / windows 98 version of the news, so I can tell what the hell my silly relatives are seeing. Stop trying to talk to me, talk to the frigging public, don't worry I will get the message.

20-45 fps with maximum # of images on ff3.6 on ubuntu 10.04 on macbook intel graphics... so you don't have have too much GPU horsepower to run this at a decent rate on linux.

The appropriate OS for a 5 year old Mac that still needs new software is linux. This has been true for years. You can get new software on linux, and your hardware support will generally be great on a machine of that age. I Have done this with a powerbook 1400 (barely supported, but interesting), iBook 800Mhz (great), Mac Mini G4, and now a Macbook Air. Currently the Mini is in the linux hardware support sweet spot. The iBook would be a little slow for a full Gnome or KDE, and the Macbook still has some driver issues because it's a niche machine that hasn't been out for years yet (a deadly combiation). Your biggest issue with new macs will be their wonky Bios/EFI, but there are programs to help with that, and the end user applications available to you will be consistently much newer that what even the last version of mac os supports. It's worth popping in an ubuntu live cd (there are ppc versions too, just harder to find on the site) to see how your mac works under a modern os.

ROT-26 has several interesting properties that make it unique among encryption algorithms,and only by knowing it's strengths and weaknesses can you decide if it is the right tool for your use case. For one, ROT-26 (and the entire ROT family of ciphers) are unique among encryption strategies in their heavy reliance on avoiding hostile interception altogether. Even if intercepted, like many of the latest stenographic or hidden volume techniques, a ROT-26 cyphertext nearly always succeeds at being completely unidentifiable as an encrypted document. It has, however, been singled out (fairly In my opinion) for being vulnerable to a trivial known-ciphertext attack that may be employed by any minimally literate expert. Although praised for it's universal hardware support and unbeatable performance (a constant time implementation of the algorithm has been discovered(!)), nonetheless, securing your data using ROT-26 is increasingly viewed as unwise.

I disagree about the importance of many of your points in the grand scheme of things (when considered against the benefits of a very capable core platform with literally thousands of plugins).

However, some of what you say is important, is widely acknowledged, and is being actively worked on. Deployment and change management for content and configurations in particular has been a weak point of drupal to this point, but there are now several major projects underway that attack this from different angles. I think the tools will get dramatically better in the next year if the presentations at drupalcon DC 2009 were any indication.

Also, I think your overall approach to web development is way over on the cathedral side (which may be because of your focus on the needs of large projects, granted). Drupal's community ecosystem flourishes on building on other folks's work. The hook system, allowing modules to exchange events and pass control back and forth, performs the same function in code. It's a very bazaar model once you get out into the contrib repository. You will need to wade into the community to get the most out of drupal, IMHO.

At one presentation I attended, Emma Jane joked about trying to marry out of her name. And I assure you Konstantin is real enough too, but they are both pretty memorable as far as names go :)

Knowing both Emma Jane and Konstantin personally, I would say that they are both developers and drupal community members first and marketing people second. Making a flashy site may just have been the last step that didn't quite happen. I believe it is each of their first books.

It is definitely a weak spot for the image of the book that the companion site only uses garland (Drupal's default theme) but please try to see this in context. This is two insiders in the drupal community trying to give the rest of the world the keys to the kingdom of Drupal theming, not two experienced marketers swooping in to take advantage of the next tech trend.

A good way to laugh this off might have been to just joke that if you don't buy this book your website might stay looking like this! :)

Ah yes, but the $80,000 goes to the butler, while most of the profit from the Rolex goes to the very wealthy people holding shares of the Rolex corp. It's questionable how "liberated" the profit from luxury items becomes - does it just go into another rich(er) man's pocket? In fact, the less your rolex costs to make in labor, the more profit goes into the pockets of Rolex co, which probably means wealthy men unless it's suddenly a worker owned cooperative.

If 10 people put in a week and were paid well making that watch, suddenly it costs plenty more (less efficient in your terms), but the money is more liberated in your terms since it is less concentrated. Which do you prefer, efficiency or liberation of the result? Unless you introduce some other rules, you're not gonna get both.

If you want people putting their time and resources into producing real wealth for all rather than making people feel special with luxury goods, why not just tax the $80,000 excess from the wealthy man and have the government hire people to produce food for the poor with that money? Sounds like the most efficient of all in the set of values you propose.

Of course this is a discussion about whiskey, not about taxation, and there is something satisfying about laboring to produce a great bottle of scotch. Probably also something satisfying in running a household well as a butler would do.

Debian has more free software than is available for osX and supports old hardware better. For instance, Leopard runs like crap on my mac mini G4 1.25ghz. Debian lenny ppc with Gnome runs well enough for it to be my main desktop / home server. It's not blazing fast, but it works and uses 10-17 watts rather than 75 for a traditional desktop. A great combination of hardware and software.

I highly recommend linux for macs, it's usually quite an upgrade.

This is the humorous media end of a much more sinister campaign designed to convince people that lots of scary voter fraud is taking place and that we need to crack down at the polling places to stop it.

The republicans are scared stiff, and want everyone to put aside the rights of new voters in a cloud of suspicion and red tape that will clog voting places, keep folks standing in line and frustrated them into not voting in minority and heavily Democratic areas. Casting suspicion on the lists used to target voters for persuasive ads is one thing - many of these are commercial advertising lists. Saying that the actual voter list has bad names on it, which evil people put there, who intend to risk their liberty to vote more than once, is harder to believe.